Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Caves

Snottite, also snoticle, is a microbial mat of single-celled extremophilic bacteria which hang from the walls and ceilings of caves and are similar to small stalactites, but have the consistency of nasal mucus. In the Frasassi Caves in Italy, over 70% of cells in Snottite have been identified as Acidithiobacillus thiooxidans, with smaller populations including an archaeon in the uncultivated 'G-plasma' clade of Thermoplasmatales (>15%) and a bacterium in the Acidimicrobiaceae family (>5%).

The bacteria derive their energy from chemosynthesis of volcanic sulfur compounds including H₂S and warm-water solution dripping down from above, producing sulfuric acid. Because of this, their waste products are highly acidic (approaching pH=0), with similar properties to battery acid. Researchers at the University of Texas have suggested that this sulfuric acid may be a more significant cause of cave formation than the usual explanation offered of the carbonic acid formed from carbon dioxide dissolved in water.

Snottites were brought to attention by researchers Diana Northup and Penny Boston studying them (and other organisms) in a toxic sulfur cave called Cueva de Villa Luz (Cave of the Lighted House), in Tabasco, Mexico. Snottites were first discovered in this cave by Jim Pisarowicz in 1986, who also coined the term.

The BBC series Wonders of the Solar System saw Professor Brian Cox examining snottites and positing that if there is life on Mars, it may be similarly primitive and hidden beneath the surface of the Red Planet.

🔗 Lists 🔗 Geography 🔗 Rivers

This article lists rivers by their average discharge measured in descending order of their water flow rate. Here, only those rivers whose discharge is more than 2,000 m³/s (71,000 cu ft/s) are shown, as this list does not include rivers with a water flow rate of less than 2,000 m³/s (71,000 cu ft/s). It can be thought of as a list of the biggest rivers on earth, measured by a specific metric.

For context, the volume of an Olympic-size swimming pool is 2,500 m³. The average flow rate at the mouth of the Amazon is sufficient to fill more than 83 such pools each second. The average flow of all the rivers in this list adds up to 1,192,134 m³/s.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Biology 🔗 Chemistry 🔗 Genetics

DNA computing is a branch of computing which uses DNA, biochemistry, and molecular biology hardware, instead of the traditional silicon-based computer technologies. Research and development in this area concerns theory, experiments, and applications of DNA computing. The term "molectronics" has sometimes been used, but this term has already been used for an earlier technology, a then-unsuccessful rival of the first integrated circuits; this term has also been used more generally, for molecular-scale electronic technology.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

The ILLIAC IV was the first massively parallel computer. The system was originally designed to have 256 64-bit floating point units (FPUs) and four central processing units (CPUs) able to process 1 billion operations per second. Due to budget constraints, only a single "quadrant" with 64 FPUs and a single CPU was built. Since the FPUs all had to process the same instruction – ADD, SUB etc. – in modern terminology the design would be considered to be single instruction, multiple data, or SIMD.

The concept of building a computer using an array of processors came to Daniel Slotnick while working as a programmer on the IAS machine in 1952. A formal design did not start until 1960, when Slotnick was working at Westinghouse Electric and arranged development funding under a US Air Force contract. When that funding ended in 1964, Slotnick moved to the University of Illinois and joined the Illinois Automatic Computer (ILLIAC) team. With funding from Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), they began the design of a newer concept with 256 64-bit processors instead of the original concept with 1,024 1-bit processors.

While the machine was being built at Burroughs, the university began building a new facility to house it. Political tension over the funding from the US Department of Defense led to the ARPA and the University fearing for the machine's safety. When the first 64-processor quadrant of the machine was completed in 1972, it was sent to the NASA Ames Research Center in California. After three years of thorough modification to fix various flaws, ILLIAC IV was connected to the ARPANet for distributed use in November 1975, becoming the first network-available supercomputer, beating the Cray-1 by nearly 12 months.

Running at half its design speed, the one-quadrant ILLIAC IV delivered 50 MFLOP peak, making it the fastest computer in the world at that time. It is also credited with being the first large computer to use solid-state memory, as well as the most complex computer built to date, with over 1 million gates. Generally considered a failure due to massive budget overruns, the design was instrumental in the development of new techniques and systems for programming parallel systems. In the 1980s, several machines based on ILLIAC IV concepts were successfully delivered.

🔗 Color 🔗 Visual arts

Non-photo blue (or non-repro blue) is a common tool used in the graphic design and print industry.

🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing

Slopsquatting is a type of cybersquatting. It is the practice of registering a non-existent software package name that a large language model (LLM) may hallucinate in its output, whereby someone unknowingly may copy-paste and install the software package without realizing it is fake. Attempting to install a non-existent package should result in an error, but some have exploited this for their gain in the form of typosquatting.

The name is a portmanteau of "slop" and "typosquatting".

🔗 Systems

Chartjunk consists of all visual elements in charts and graphs that are not necessary to comprehend the information represented on the graph, or that distract the viewer from this information.

Markings and visual elements can be called chartjunk if they are not part of the minimum set of visuals necessary to communicate the information understandably. Examples of unnecessary elements that might be called chartjunk include heavy or dark grid lines, unnecessary text, inappropriately complex or gimmicky font faces, ornamented chart axes, and display frames, pictures, backgrounds or icons within data graphs, ornamental shading and unnecessary dimensions.

Another kind of chartjunk skews the depiction and makes it difficult to understand the real data being displayed. Examples of this type include items depicted out of scale to one another, noisy backgrounds making comparison between elements difficult in a chart or graph, and 3-D simulations in line and bar charts.

The term chartjunk was coined by Edward Tufte in his 1983 book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Tufte wrote:

The interior decoration of graphics generates a lot of ink that does not tell the viewer anything new. The purpose of decoration varies—to make the graphic appear more scientific and precise, to enliven the display, to give the designer an opportunity to exercise artistic skills. Regardless of its cause, it is all non-data-ink or redundant data-ink, and it is often chartjunk.

The term is relatively recent and is often associated with Tufte in other references.

The concept is analogous to Adolf Loos's idea that ornament is a crime.

🔗 Volcanoes 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Geology 🔗 Indonesia

The Toba supereruption was a supervolcanic eruption that occurred about 75,000 years ago at the site of present-day Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. It is one of the Earth's largest known eruptions. The Toba catastrophe theory holds that this event caused a global volcanic winter of six to ten years and possibly a 1,000-year-long cooling episode.

In 1993, science journalist Ann Gibbons posited that a population bottleneck occurred in human evolution about 70,000 years ago, and she suggested that this was caused by the eruption. Geologist Michael R. Rampino of New York University and volcanologist Stephen Self of the University of Hawaii at Manoa support her suggestion. In 1998, the bottleneck theory was further developed by anthropologist Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Both the link and global winter theories are controversial. The Toba event is the most closely studied supereruption.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Aviation/Soviet aviation

The Lun-class ekranoplan is a ground effect vehicle (GEV) designed by Rostislav Evgenievich Alexeyev in 1975 and used by the Soviet and Russian navies from 1987 until sometime in the late 1990s.

It flew using the lift generated by the ground effect of its large wings when within about four metres (13 ft) above the surface of the water. Although they might look similar to regular aircraft, and have related technical characteristics, ekranoplans like the Lun are not aircraft, seaplanes, hovercraft, nor hydrofoils. Rather, "ground effect" is a distinct technology. The International Maritime Organization classifies these vehicles as maritime ships.

The name Lun comes from the Russian word for harrier.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Scheme 48 is a programming language, a dialect of the language Scheme, an implementation using an interpreter which emits bytecode. It has a foreign function interface for calling functions from the language C and comes with a library for regular expressions (regex), and an interface for Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX). It is supported by the portable Scheme library SLIB, and is the basis for the Scheme shell Scsh. It has been used in academic research. It is free and open-source software released under a BSD license.

It is called "Scheme 48" because the first version was written in 48 hours in August 1986. The authors now say it is intended to be understood in 48 hours.